Minister Steve Pieters endured the AIDS crisis. He’s a beacon of faith battling new virus
LOS ANGELES -- Minutes before KABC-TV’s nightly news show 330 went on the air, the Rev. Steven Pieters wasn’t in the studio chatting with the other panelists. He’d been exiled outside, to a dark alley next to the AIDS Project Los Angeles office in Hollywood.
It was 1986, and Pieters was scheduled to participate in a five-member panel to discuss the state of the HIV/AIDs pandemic, at the height of the viral infection then wreaking havoc on LGBTQ+ communities. He had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDs four years prior and at one point was given only eight months to live.
Fearing the risk of transmission, the studio’s camera and production crew refused to work if Pieters remained in the studio. So while the rest of the panel touched up their makeup and indulged in concession snacks inside an air-conditioned studio, a production assistant slapped a lavalier microphone and sound buffer on Pieters’ buttoned-up cassock and led him outside.
Tuning into the program to discuss the HIV/AIDs epidemic via satellite, Pieters told viewers that AIDS patients weren’t monsters.
“People with AIDS were considered to be the lepers of the time,” Pieters said in a recent interview at his Silver Lake home. “People just didn’t want anything to do with us.”
It was
